ABSTRACT
The big-name Greeks had no interest in origins, mainly because there were none! Plato and Aristotle believed in an eternal world, where there may be limited change, but essentially all was as it was in the beginning and will always be in the future (Sedley 2008). There were some who challenged this vision, Empedocles for example, but generally they were few, and were regarded as muddled and misguided. The ancient Jews, of course, did have their creation story, and it was this that governed Western thinking right through the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This persistence was not so much a fact that no-one wanted to go against Holy Scripture – Augustine, around 400 AD, had argued that if the evidence shows otherwise, literalistic interpretations of the Bible must be relinquished (McMullin 1985). It was rather that there was no reason to dispute the accuracy of the Genesis accounts of origins. Things started to change in the eighteenth century, in part because of new discoveries –
fossils, embryological details, species from around the world – but even more because of the ideology of progress (Ruse 1996, 2005). The Reformation had firmly established the significance of Providence for the believer. We humans are fallen sinners and without God’s help we can do nothing. Progress counters this. It is the claim that unaided we can, through our own abilities and efforts, improve knowledge and health and living generally. We can go from ignorance to understanding, from sickness to vibrancy, frompoverty to wealth. In other words, we can go from lesser to greater, we can go upwards. Progressionists (perhaps the earliest was the French novelist and encyclopedist Denis Diderot) took this cultural idea, and read it into the biological world – from blob to sophisticated organism, from (as they used to say) monad to man. Erasmus Darwin, the physician grandfather of Charles Darwin, was a paradigm.
